"I Have Abused Someone Who Abused Me": Understanding People Who Have Experienced Both Sides of Harassment Accusations in Social VR

Social VR’s focus on embodied and immersive experiences has led to intensified and more physicalized forms of harassment than other online contexts. Therefore, a growing body of HCI and CSCW work has explored multiple strategies and mechanisms to prevent and mitigate harassment risks in social VR. However, existing works have also highlighted a fundamental challenge in mitigating harassment in social VR – the apparent lack of consensus among social VR users on how to explicitly define harassment and what behaviors should be considered harassing in social VR. In this work, we aim to offer new knowledge on the uncertainty about how harassment is defined and perceived in social VR, particularly by learning from social VR users who have experienced both sides of harassment accusations. Based on interviews with 12 participants with diverse identities who have both been harassed by others and been accused of harassing others in social VR, we unpack how people justify and reflect on their behavior given their prior experiences of both being victims of harassment and being called a harasser. We thus offer unique insights into the complexity of harassment in social VR by highlighting cases of "gray areas" and critical ethical implications in such harassment accusations, which are understudied in the existing literature. We also propose two high-level design principles for new strategies and approaches to foster safe social VR spaces based on people’s unique experiences of both sides of harassment accusations in social VR.